Links to mine and my colleagues' presentations!
Today for our class we created our own artifact bags based on the topics that we taught to the students in our fieldwork. The links mine and the rest of my colleagues' presentations can be found above. We each picked three or four artifacts that had something to do with our topic and put them in a mystery bag. We then designed presentations which we presented to our peers in the next class. We also found websites and children's books that could be used for this activity to give students more information on the topic.
My topic that I taught on was Christopher Columbus so I included different artifacts that had to do with Columbus. My first artifact was an Italian and Spanish flag. Columbus was of Italian descent but in order to take his voyages he needed the money from Spain. The flag is a representation of the two countries. My next artifact was an image of the Santa Maria ship. This ship was the largest of Columbus' three ships. My last artifact was corn, this was a representation of the Columbian Exchange. During the Columbian Exchange, Columbus transported all different kinds of goods including corn. The main objective of the artifact bag activity was to have the other group members guess what was in the bag and why all of the objects were in the bag together. All of these objects were in the bag together because they had to do with Christopher Columbus.
The artifact bag activity can be used when introducing a new unit or topic, or to give students a more hands-on experience. Using an artifact bag in the classroom is also a great way to get students to make inferences about a certain topic that they are learning about or they are going to be learning about. It is a really great activity to use to get students excited about what they are going to be learning. Students can even create their own artifact bag about themselves!
Strategies to use in history are:
The EPIC Strategy which allows students to make connections between themselves and the topic of history that they are going to be learning about
Using Primary Sources and Documents allows the students to have a first-hand experience of what happened in history
Using Artifacts to get the students engaged in the lesson that you are going to be teaching. Teaching with artifacts is a good way to. Hands-on activity
Body Sculpting- acting out scenes in history with their bodies
Role-playing- giving students certain roles and having them act out
Local History- relating the history to the students' community and what is around them. Have the students' interview people in their community or go to different places of historical importance in their community.
As future social studies teachers, we are always looking for ways to make social studies more engaging and exciting for our students. In the reading from our textbook and an article that I read, I learned different ways that I could teach social studies to my students in an engaging way. One of the main ways to get students engaged in history is to use primary sources and documents. By using primary sources and documents the students are getting a first-hand experience of what happened in history and they are more interested in learning about it. Another strategy to get the students involved in learning is to use artifacts. By doing an activity like an artifact bag the students are getting to discover different objects that were used throughout a certain period of social studies. It is a good activity because it is a hands-on activity and some students are better learners when they have a hands-on activity. The students are also getting to see how these artifacts were important during the time period.
A good strategy to use with younger students and also older students as well to help them understand a certain scene or battle that happened in history is to have them do role-playing or do body sculpting. In both of these strategies the students act out a scene or battle in history and through this the students gain a better understanding by doing instead of just reading about it from a textbook. When students are engaged and participating in the lesson they are more likely to remember the information as opposed to when they just read it out of the textbook. One other strategy that could be used to help make history more exciting for students is connecting it to their local history. Relating the history to the students' community and what is around them. Have the students' interview people in their community about the community used to be like back in the day. Have the students go to different places of historical importance in their community. Another strategy to use to have students make connections is the EPIC Strategy. This strategy involves having the students make connections between themselves and to the topic of social studies that they are learning about. When students are able to make connections to what they are learning about they are more engaged learning and they are also better able to understand the material that is being taught.
Today was our final day of fieldwork in our fifth-grade class. We had so many fun things planned for the students to celebrate their learning! We first started by asking the students if we did a good job teaching them and if they remembered the preassessment that we did way back in the beginning of the month. After we got the students feedback on how good of a job we did teaching them we gave them a quick test to see what they remembered from all of our groups teaching them. While the students were taking the test the teachers were walking around the classroom and helping the students if they needed help. Once the students had finished their tests we played one of their favorite games, Kahoot! The students were so excited that we were playing this game with them one last time. The game consisted of different questions from all of the different groups that taught throughout the month. The students were getting very competitive during the game at some points we would have to remind them to stay quiet so that we could read the next question. It was good to see the students competing in a fun manner and at the same time showing what they knew from what we taught them. After playing the game we presented a gift to the class which was a two-volume set on the voyages of Columbus so that they could learn more about Columbus and the voyages that he took.
We then presented the class with certificates to celebrate their achievement of completing the unit plan that we had planned for them. The students were very excited that they were getting certificates for all of the hard work that they put into each of our lessons.
After presenting the certificates to the students the teachers gave their feedback on what this experience has been like for them and what the students helped them to realize. The students taught us to be knowledgeable about our topics and material because they asked a lot of good questions. The students also taught us how to manage a classroom, when they were getting too louder or when they were getting off topic and we had to get their attention back to us. Overall it was a great experience getting to teach to a whole class of students and getting to work with a group to create three different lesson plans. The different skills that I learned in this experience I will definitely be able to use in my future classroom.
On Wednesday, November 1, 2017, I had the chance to be part of an experience that changed my life for the better. This experience was the poverty simulation, during this simulation you really got to see what the life of a person in poverty is like and what they have to go through just to make it from day to day. Although I was not part of one of the families during this simulation I was the teacher in the public school. It was very stressful and frustrating being the teacher because most of the time the students were not motivated to do the work and they did not want to be in school. I would have to send home cards asking families for money for supplies and most of them would bring little money or no money back. This is because school supplies was not some of the families priority at the time. Being the school teacher I experienced a lot of different things. Some of the things that I experienced were students selling drugs trying to make money for their families. There were some students who stopped coming to school because they were trying to help their families make money and they did not think that school was important to them. There was one student in the class who was pregnant and went into labor but did not have the insurance to go to the hospital or the doctor to have the baby. The point of the simulation was to show us that we do not really know someone until we have walked in their shoes and that we should not judge other people. We do not know what kind of a background others come from and what struggles they have been through in their lives.
Some of the struggles that the families would have to go through throughout the simulation were finding a way to feed their family from week to week, how they were going to pay their bills, and how they were going to get more money or transportation passes. The families would only have 15 minutes to do whatever it was that they needed to do within in that week. After the 15 minutes was up the agencies would close and the families would be sent back to their homes. The people at the agencies could either make or break a deal for the families and they were the ones that decided whether they got what they needed.
This simulation was an overall very eye-opening experience. It opened my eyes to something that is all around me every day. I never knew that families had to go through this much trouble just to get from place to place and how hard it was to feed their children just for the week. These are the things that we take for grant it and we don't realize that until we don't have them
